Conducting Studies
Conducting Studies (with Ava Ansari)
Exhibited at the Museum of Contemporary Art of Santa Barbara, September - December, 2013
Exhibited at the International Symposium on Electronic Arts in Dubai, November 2014.
Exhibited at the Glassel Gallery in Baton Rouge, June 2015.



As part of the "Conducting Studies" series, these works are an ongoing exploration of musical embodiment, a translation of the physical performance of an orchestra conductor to visual imagery representing the conductor's movements, as captured through the motion of the conductor's baton. Each individual piece represents a complete loop from the music score on paper to its embodiment by the conductors body and back again to screen and paper.

The first exhibition explored these themes through the work of Tchaikovsky: "A group of… biomorphic-looking drawings around the room are the process-based results of a system from the artists' "conducting series" in which the actual gestures and motions of the conductor's guiding hands are translated into visual terms, but stripped of specific musical or figurative allusions. With these conceptual tracings, one art form begets another, but through an unexpected and peripheral code and process. Tchaikovsky's late, Romantic bombast is mysteriously, yet systematically channeled and transformed into minimalist visual terms. And, not incidentally, the results are given a due and atmospherically beneficial, public art forum…"

- Santa Barbara News Press, Scene Magazine, Oct 4, 2013.


The work for Dubai in 2014 (also shown at Glassel Gallery in Baton Rouge in 2015) was inspired by “One Thousand and One Nights”, one of the oldest narrations in history. Excerpts from the embodiment of selected musical pieces motivated by the ancient story by a music conductor has been processed by computer software and preserved as digital drawings and videos. The visual record is proposed as an alternative manuscript of the score--a version of the story, which is focused on the performance of its teller, the conductor.

For the Dubai exhibition, a robotic plotter was utilized to physically translate the motion of the conductor to paper and canvas.












Script video of Tchaikovsky exploration (one of three video-based visualizations)
(shown here rotated to the side for YouTube formatting)